While the last 20 years saw the invention of corruption rankings, allowing comparison between countries and the shaming of corrupt governments, such measurements are largely based on the perceptions of experts, lacking both specificity and transparency. New research, based on a comprehensive theory of governance defined as the set of formal and informal institutions determining […] Read more

Government favouritism in the allocation of public funds raises costs for any society in which corruption prevails. Particularistic transactions can be identified in three different situations: uncompetitive awards of public contracts when there is only one “competitive” tender, when public money is spent on contracts supplied by politically connected firms, and a situation of capture […] Read more

In order to address the lack of reliable indicators of corruption, this article develops a composite indicator of high-level institutionalised corruption through a novel ‘Big Data’ approach. Using publicly available electronic public procurement records in Hungary, we identify “red flags” in the public procurement process and link them to restricted competition and recurrent contract award […] Read more

The measurement of corruption is an old challenge of both academics and the policy community, due to the absence of a unanimously agreed upon definition and the widespread (although inaccurate) belief that owing to its informal and hidden nature, corruption is an unobservable phenomenon. The articles in this issue challenge this belief. Read more

What regional factors can explain the heterogeneity in Structural Funds distribution to European Union regions? Past studies have shown that aside from the level of economic development and rates of unemployment, other political, and economic factors systematically explain why certain European Union regions receive greater funding than others, in particular where there is room for […] Read more

The study focuses on two Slovak corruption cases, both well-documented and of similar social relevance, of which one did not receive any cross-media coverage. Moreover, the case of large-scale bribery was rather under-hyped in comparison to other major corruption scandals occurring in the country. The case of cronyism formed a typical example of extremely poor […] Read more

This case study reports about the collusion scandal behind the widespread wiretapping operations of various journalists. The report, however, focuses mainly on one part of the affair, namely the clear collusion between a journalist from the daily Pravda, and a top politician – a Member of Parliament, whose conversations were also recorded. MP Robert Kaliňák […] Read more

The present article analyzes a relatively unusual case, in which a quasi-investigative journalist, working in an entirely independent capacity, succeeded in uncovering and foiling an international money laundering attempt. This extremely significant story reveals the existence of a complex legal framework for tackling money-laundering operations in the EU. In this particular instance, local police and […] Read more

Generalized trust has become a prominent concept at the nexus of several disciplines, and the wide differences in trust between different societies continue to puzzle the social sciences. In this study, we explore the effects of micro and macro level factors in explaining an individual’s propensity to ‘trust others’. We hypothesize that higher levels of […] Read more

This chapter examines two episodes of large-scale corruption that erupted in 2014: the procurements process for the MOSE tidal barrier project, which is intended to surround and protect Venice, and the contracts signed in the run-up to Expo 2015 in Milan. The chapter shows how networks of corruption have survived the “clean hands” scandal of […] Read more